Time Enough for Love

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She came back with a chair.

  Charles couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. But every time he felt himself start to drift off, he forced himself to sit up straighter and have another cup of coffee.

  He was determined to keep talking to Maggie. He was sure that somewhere, even if only in the back of her subconscious mind, she could hear him.

  And he wanted to make sure he was there and awake when she opened her eyes again.

  At first the nurses tried to talk him into taking a nap. But after a while they gave up and brought him a fresh cup of coffee every time they came in to check on Maggie.

  The only problem with coffee was that after drinking about three cups, he was forced to leave Maggie’s side for a minute or two.

  And naturally, he was in the bathroom when she woke up.

  “She’s asking for you,” one of the nurses told him as he walked out of the men’s room.

  Charles ran down the hall, praying that he’d get to her before she slipped back into a painkiller-induced sleep.

  He burst through the door. “Maggie!”

  Her eyes were closed, but she spoke. “Chuck.”

  Chuck. She wanted Chuck.

  Charles felt sick. He felt his heart drop down into his stomach. She wanted Chuck, but Chuck was gone. Forever.

  He felt a surge of emotions. Grief for her loss. The pain and despair of his own dashed hopes and expectations. Fear that if she knew the truth, if she knew Chuck was gone, she’d give up her fight to stay alive.

  Charles reached for her hand, uncertain how to tell her.

  As his fingers touched hers her eyes opened.

  He could see both her pain and the medication she was being given to numb it in her eyes. She was barely able to focus, and she blinked up at him, trying to clear her foggy vision.

  “Chuck,” she said again.

  The cut on his cheek. No doubt she saw it and in her grogginess she mistook him for his future self. He started to shake his head, to tell her no, but she reached for him, pulling him closer, clearly wanting to tell him something of great importance.

  “Chuck, it’s … okay,” she breathed. “You can go now. I’m going to be all right.”

  She tried to squeeze his hand, but her grip was impossibly weak. Charles couldn’t speak. He didn’t know what to say.

  “I love you,” she whispered. “I’ll always love you, and remember you. But I have to … be honest.”

  She fell into a silence that lasted so long, Charles pulled back slightly, thinking she was once again asleep. But her eyes were still open. They were filled with tears.

  “I know why you wanted me and Charlie … to be together. You were right.…”

  “I don’t understand.…”

  “You knew if I could love you, if I could love the man you’ve become, despite all you’ve done and all you wouldn’t tell me … then I would love Charlie even more.” Her eyes closed and the last of her words were spoken on a sigh. “And I do.”

  Charles sent a silent prayer of thanks to Chuck, wherever he was. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t going to take Chuck’s dark and dangerous path. It didn’t matter that he was never going to become Chuck.

  He was already something better than Chuck.

  He was Charlie.

  And Maggie loved him, just the way he was.

  · · ·

  Maggie’s throat was sore. Her mouth and tongue were dry and tasted like the floor of a barn.

  Her eyelids were heavy and glued shut. It took close to forever to pry them open, but when she did, she was rewarded by the sight of Charles, fast asleep in a chair next to her bed.

  From the looks of the hospital room, from the number of empty coffee cups scattered around the room, he appeared to have moved in.

  How long had she been here?

  Judging from the growth of stubble on Charles’s chin, it had been quite a few days.

  She tried to moisten her lips to speak, but when she opened her mouth, she made barely more than a dry-sounding rattle.

  Nevertheless, Charles sat up, instantly alert.

  “Hey,” he said, his lips curving up into one of his truly fabulous smiles.

  He poured some water from a pitcher into a waiting cup, and held it out for her, positioning the straw so that it reached her lips.

  The water was almost as refreshing as his smile, and she sighed deeply with contentment—then realized that deep sighs, in fact, deep breaths of any kind, were no longer in her repertoire.

  “Hurts, huh?” Charles’s eyes were dark with concern as she stifled a groan.

  “Yeah,” she managed to rasp.

  “You’re going to be okay.” He took her hand. “You woke up just in time to watch them move you out of the ICU.”

  The cut on his cheek was starting to heal. “You’re going to have a scar,” Maggie whispered, “right where Chuck did.”

  Charles nodded. “Probably.”

  “Funny,” she said.

  “He’s gone, you know.”

  Maggie looked into Charles’s eyes. “Not all of him. Not the best part of him.”

  He gave another of those slow, wonderful smiles. “We’ve been driving the police crazy, you and I.”

  She laughed, and discovered that laughing was something else she shouldn’t do a great deal of for a while.

  “I told them the truth,” he continued after she’d recovered slightly, “but they haven’t exactly taken the time-travel part of the story and embraced it. They remain stumped by the blood on the sheets. They’ve done DNA testing, and it’s obviously my blood, but they know that amount couldn’t possibly have come from the cut on my cheek.… I told them about Chuck being shot, but every time I mention him, they send another shrink in to evaluate me.

  “And the bullet they took out of you—it’s unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. But whenever I tell them it came from a gun that was made seven years in the future, they get really tense.”

  Maggie bit her lip. “Don’t make me laugh!”

  “Enough of the neighbors saw Goodwin’s hired gun running out of the house. I think the police suspect we were being held hostage by him, and that the trauma created this odd delusion we share about time travelers.”

  “I don’t care what they think,” Maggie told him. “I’m just glad that it’s over.”

  Charles nodded. His eyes were soft as he touched her hair, as his thumb stroked her cheek.

  “So,” she said a bit breathlessly, “you’re off to New York.”

  Something shifted in his eyes. “I am.”

  Silence. Maggie broke it by clearing her throat. “So,” she said again. “I guess I’m wondering if you’re going to ask me to come along, or if you’re going to let me slip away. What’s it gonna be, Charlie? Are you going to spend the next seven years pining away for me the way you did the first time around?”

  Her words didn’t get the smile she expected. In fact, he took them dead seriously, not as the rather lame joke she’d intended.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “I’m the only man in the world who can learn from mistakes that I haven’t even made yet.” He paused, and Maggie nearly drowned in the midnight darkness of his eyes. “Maggie, please do me the honor of becoming my wife and come to New York with me.”

  Maggie laughed, then grimaced in pain. Of all the things she’d suspected he’d say, that wasn’t one of them. Marry her. He wanted to marry her. Was it possible …?

  Maggie searched his eyes and found what she was looking for. Yes. He loved her. It wasn’t like Chuck’s love—fueled by years of disappointment and frustration and pain. Instead it was new and fresh, like her own love for him, accompanied by wonder and delight and that ever-burning heat of desire. Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Charlie—”

  He leaned over and kissed her gently.

  “I love you, Maggie,” he told her, almost as an afterthought. “You have no idea how much.”

  Maggie smiled. “Yes, I do. And yes, I’ll marry you.�
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  She knew that he loved her just from looking into his eyes.

  But she sure did like to hear the words.

  EPILOGUE

  HE STOOD IN the bedroom, dizzy, wondering what he was doing there. He’d come upstairs to get something and then …

  The room seemed somehow different to him. The carpeting softer, the colors more subdued, the floral-patterned bedspread unfamiliar. And the view out the window …

  It wasn’t the desert. Instead of the flat arid landscape, he found himself looking out at snow-covered hills. New England, he remembered suddenly. This wasn’t Arizona. It was Massachusetts.

  It was Thanksgiving in Massachusetts. It was their third Thanksgiving in this house in this little town that he and Maggie loved so much.

  Maggie …

  He turned as he heard her push open the door, as she came into the bedroom. Their bedroom.

  She was wearing a dark blue velvet dress that swept all the way to the ground and almost entirely concealed her softly swelling abdomen. Their second baby. She was pregnant with their second child. She wore her hair down around her shoulders, and as she gazed at him she looked so beautiful, his breath caught in his throat.

  His wife. Of nearly seven years now.

  “Are you okay?” she asked softly.

  He nodded, unable to speak. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this happy. Yet, at the same time, he could remember. He could remember every single day of the past seven years, waking up with Maggie in his bed. He remembered the joy of shared mornings and the quiet intimacy of late nights spent talking and making love.

  He remembered the afternoon nearly three years earlier when he’d helped his wife give birth to their daughter, Annie. He remembered holding their precious baby in his arms, of rocking her to sleep. He remembered the chubby toddler Annie had become, the way she raced to greet him every day when he came home from work. He remembered it all. It was so good, so sweet. It was the life he’d always dreamed of having.

  He could tell from the way Maggie was standing, from the look in her eyes, that she knew. She stepped forward unhesitatingly, into his embrace, and he held her tightly, so much so that he was afraid he might hurt her. But she held him just as close.

  “Hello, Chuck,” she whispered.

  “Mags.” It was all he could manage to say before he kissed her.

  It was funny. The pain in his leg. The fever from the bullet wound. Gone. All gone. All of the anger and resentment and bitterness he’d carried with him for so long was gone. Just like that. Gone. He’d thought he’d simply be gone as well, but he’d been wrong.…

  He wasn’t gone. He was back in his own time. But it was a different time. A better time.

  And he was Chuck, but … he wasn’t. He felt so different. So happy. So at peace and so content with his life.

  He’d thought that wanting Maggie so desperately for seven years, that loving her from a distance, had made his love so powerful, so sharp and strong.

  But he realized now that the love he felt in those rapidly fading memories was nothing compared with the incredible love that had grown from having and holding her for the past seven years.

  He didn’t want to be Chuck. And he wasn’t. Not anymore. Not ever again.

  She pulled back to gaze into his eyes, and it was as if she could read his mind. She gave him one of her wonderful, gorgeous smiles. “You’re Charlie now.”

  He managed to smile, too, despite the tears in his eyes. “I am. Thank God.” And he was. The memories he had of the past seven years of his life with Maggie were so much stronger, so much more real than the ghostly echo of that other life he’d had.

  Maggie stood on her toes to kiss him again, and Charlie felt himself sigh.

  He was Charlie Della Croce, and he was home.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at the first original paperback romance from New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann in more than six years

  Infamous

  Available from Ballantine Books in September 2010

  ONE

  Jubilation, Arizona

  Present day

  THE SON OF a bitch was going to make her lie.

  Sons of bitches, Alison Carter corrected herself, because her adorable new friend Hugh was part of this hideous charade. In fact, it was rapidly becoming crystal clear that this—her impending lie—was the young production assistant’s reason for bringing her here, to this undetermined level of hell. Oh, it looked like the dusty street outside of movie star Trace Marcus’s huge trailer, but it was definitely hell.

  The morning sky was clear and so blue it hurt Alison’s eyes. It was barely 8:30, and the desert sun was already much too hot on the back of her neck.

  “Who is she?” Trace’s wife demanded through her tears, her mascara making black streaks down what had once been a ridiculously pretty face. Now she just looked ridiculous, the plastic surgery she’d had leaving her looking perpetually surprised as she confronted her philandering husband. “I want to know—I deserve to know!”

  “I hate you,” Alison murmured to Hugh, who, with his tastefully messed red hair, hazel eyes, and athletically trim body, remained adorable despite his dragging her into this.

  “Trace needs to be in makeup in twenty minutes,” he murmured back as he pulled her closer to this snake pit of domestic non-bliss. “Ninety-seven thousand dollars an hour …”

  That was his default answer to almost anything—his recitation of the enormous amount of money it was costing director Henry Logan’s production company to bring this movie—Quinn—to the big screen.

  And it was true that if an actor were late to the set, money would, indeed, pour from the company’s veins as dozens of crew members stood around, uselessly waiting for the star to undiva his or her ass and get down to work.

  So far, it had happened four different times, courtesy of Trace Marcus.

  “Who is she, Tracey?” Marcus’s wife asked him again. His creepy and ever-present personal assistant, Skip, mumbled something in his low-talker’s voice that Alison couldn’t hear, but the wife could and she snapped, “Shut up, Skippy, I wasn’t asking you.”

  Alison couldn’t remember Mrs. Marcus’s name, but she, like her husband, had been a huge star back when she was in her late teens, early twenties.

  Which really wasn’t that long ago.

  Trace had started celebrating his thirty-third birthday last night. Thirty-three, and he was in desperate need of a “come back,” which playing Silas Quinn was designed to provide.

  No doubt about it, this was a crazy, crazy business Alison was dipping her toe into here. And she’d always thought the academic world was a little nuts.

  But here she was, standing in the dust beneath the blistering hot sun, ready to provide an alibi for a man who wasn’t just a crazy actor, but was also a card-carrying moron. It was his freaking birthday. Today. A degree in rocket science wasn’t needed to theorize that since it was his birthday, it was highly likely that his loving wife was going to show up here on location, to surprise him with a visit.

  Instead Trace had surprised her. Eleanor. That was her name. Although it really shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise for Eleanor to find her husband’s trailer rocking, not after ten long years spent married to the man. He was a dog. Surely she knew that by now. He couldn’t keep his pants zipped to save his life; forget about saving his marriage.

  The day Trace had arrived on set, not five minutes after stepping into the much smaller trailer which was Alison’s new office, he’d hit on her—and she’d been so startled she’d laughed in his face.

  Which was a mistake, because he now avoided her like the swine flu.

  As the official historical consultant for this film, as the author of the latest definitive book about the shoot-out at the Red Rock Saloon, Alison had a wealth of information about the details of Silas Quinn’s life. She had a file with newspaper clippings and rare photos. Pictures of Quinn with Melody, taken shortly after their weddin
g. Pictures of the deceptively pleasant-looking Kid Gallagher gambling in San Francisco. Pictures Trace should want to see as he worked to bring Quinn back to life in this big-budget, high-profile movie.

  Alison even had an actual cigar box that the marshal had once kept upon his desk, along with the Bible that the man had carried with him for most of his too short life, even though he’d never had time to learn to read.

  Filming had started, but Trace wasn’t interested in seeing any of that material, because Alison had thought he was joking when he’d offered to do her on her desk, the way he’d done to Gina Gershon’s character in Last Cowboy Standing.

  And yes, the man was almost freakishly handsome with his dark hair and brown eyes, with that trademark Marcus smile. All of the excess weight he’d put on in his late twenties had finally turned into man-muscle. True, he no longer could play a scene without his shirt, but he was now the perfect size to play Silas Quinn, who’d been a full-grown, incredibly attractive bear of a man.

  Still, Trace’s offer had been absurd.

  And maybe Alison was unused to the ways of Hollywood, coming as she had from Boston College’s history department, where doing it on one’s desk with a married man was usually frowned upon, independent of whether or not one was a Gina Gershon fan.

  And so she’d laughed at his proposal. Loudly.

  In Trace’s handsome face.

  She’d seen, right away, that he was affronted, and she’d immediately apologized and even thanked him—which felt beyond strange—telling him that casual sex just wasn’t her thing.

  Which was not a lie. It was just not usually something she had to tell a man within five minutes of meeting him.

  “Let’s move this inside,” Hugh suggested now, talking to Skippy, who tried to herd them toward the trailer door, but Eleanor clearly liked having an audience.

  “I heard him in there, fucking some slut,” she told them, the crass language oddly jarring, spoken as it was in her little girl voice. She spoke loudly enough so that the growing crowd of extras and crew could hear her, too. “So I left, but then I thought, Why am I always the one running away? So I came back, but she was already gone, and now he says it wasn’t him in there, that he was at a meeting—at eight o’clock in the morning when his call isn’t until eleven … Like I’m supposed to believe that?”